This simple act brought him face to face with the ice cliff he had been leaning back against. Like the far jaw of the valley mouth, it was a breaking wave with a steep overhang supported by stalactites of ice, huge columns too massive to be called more icicles, which had been large enough to stand against the hot breath of the harmattan. Behind them rose a wall apparently of glass into which, as Steve Bollom had warned, there reached a honeycomb of caves. And, like a real honeycomb, some of the cave mouths were sealed. Those nearest John, for example, were sealed with thick greenish panes of ice.
Against the inside of the nearest glass-clear pane, staring out from the mouth of a sealed cave with scarcely sane intensity straight into John’s eyes was the face of a man. The ice was thick enough to bear the man’s weight as he knelt there, leaning forward, clawing against the inner surface as though trying wildly to break out. It was thick enough to bear his weight but clear enough to hide nothing of what was pressed against it. The face was absolutely white where it was covered with skin but some of it, like the claw hands pressing palm out beside it, had been flensed down to red muscle and white bone.
John shouted aloud with shock. He lurched back onto his knees, knocked upright as though by an upper cut. The lips in the face, spread wide in a grinning grimace, were nearly black. The teeth were pearl white and square, seemingly huge between shrunken gums. The nose was fine, slightly hooked and skinless down one side. The cheekbones were sharp, the chin square. The eyes were wide and staring, like marbles; dead as doll’s eyes. John shouted again and scrabbled backwards wildly until he was stopped by what felt like two tree trunks close together. He tore his gaze away from the hypnotically shocking vision frozen into the ice cliff and looked up at the figure of Richard Mariner towering above him. Richard reached down, gripped him by the shoulder and, as though he was weightless, raised him to his feet. Without taking his eyes off the figure which had so shocked John, he said quietly, ‘So that’s what happened to him. I wondered. We all did.’
Still deeply gripped by shock, John gasped and gobbled for a moment until die effect die corpse had had on Richard registered. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Who wondered what, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Robin, Colin, Ann Cable; everyone else who knew him. Wondered what happened to him after they got away.’
‘You know who this is? You remember who this is?’ John simply could not believe what was happening. How could the shock of finding another corpse on this God-cursed iceberg possibly have jolted Richard’s memory back into place?
But it had. ‘Oh yes,’ he said quietly, his voice even colder than the unforgiving ice around him. ‘I remember everything about this particular son of a bitch. I never actually met him, but I’ve seen his picture often enough and I know all there is to know about him, now.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
The messages both found their way desultorily and at different times into the communications room in the bowels of 2 Dzerzhinsky Street, Moscow. One came direct from England and the other, more circuitously, from Washington via East Germany in the normal liaison between the STASI and the KGB. Thence they were passed to the records section as neither report was tagged urgent or important. In the old days, they would have been filed — everything was always filed — and forgotten for years until some grey apparatchik made a connection on the third or fourth routine check. But not now. Now they were fed straight into the computer to join the millions of other random pieces of information in its almost infinite memory. Because the mainframe was only updated with non-urgent information once a month, it happened that the news of both Dougie Dundas’s strange death and the form of Paul Chan’s unusual scar were fed in together.
Seven years or so previously, in the aftermath of Chernobyl and before Tomsk Seven had demonstrated how little anyone really cared about nuclear accidents in Russia, a perpetual file had been opened especially to contain facts related to the disaster. The file had been tagged, in those far-off days when the disaster was still of major political importance, for the attention of the Deputy Director. So that, although the reports individually were of no apparent importance, coming together as they did they caused the computer automatically to reactivate the Chernobyl file. The original program was clear and the directive inescapable: into this file the computer had to place any reports of radioactive black glass and any reports of the words Leonid and Brezhnev when associated with ships, the sea or radioactivity.
And the fact that the file was being reactivated and thus updated rang an alarm bell in the Deputy Director’s office.
Moscow was in turmoil. President Yeltsin was preparing for direct confrontation with the People’s Assembly who were preparing to barricade themselves in the White House. There was a threat of revolution in the air and senior officers of both the armed and security services were habitually rushing hither and yon at a moment’s notice, summoned for secret negotiations by one side or the other as the political situation slid rapidly out of control.
Even so, it was unusual for a senior officer in GRU Army Intelligence to be riding towards Dzerzhinksy Street last thing on a Friday evening — unless he was going to the Detsky Mir toy store to buy a doll for his daughter who was waiting with his wife at their weekend dacha out in the woods. This, indeed, was an idea which appealed to Lieutenant General Boris Bovary, for he did not relish being summoned to the offices of a rival organisation on such short notice. But he was an acute man, and he had not risen to eminence merely by being the most successful intelligence commander in Afghanistan. No, he thought as his Zil pulled up and his driver saluted him smartly out of the back, the KGB might be a toothless tiger, but it still had long claws. And an infinite memory.
He paused on the steps and looked across the wide road towards the bright bustle of the store where only the most privileged, the richest, and the foreign could afford to shop. Like most of the other big shops, in fact, during this painful period of post-Party reconstruction.
Bovary had been careful not to speculate about why he had been summoned here. No one in his own office had been able to think of anything. His commanding officer had also been stumped but gruffly certain of the importance of whatever it was. The old man was tired and out of touch nowadays but Boris respected his contacts. Indeed, he respected his own contacts, too. So, if there was no glimmer of news, then this was either very secret or extremely obscure. Speculation would only serve to channel his mind into presuppositions which would blinker him and be counterproductive, perhaps dangerous.
With his mind absolutely blank, therefore, he presented his credentials and followed the shapely figure of a young secretary sent to escort him up to his destination. She had a fine-boned, intelligent face, a full chest which caused the buttons of her fine blouse to strain, a slim waist and wide, welcoming hips. In the lift, alone with her, he sniffed secretly but appreciatively. She smelt of soap, even in this heat. Most attractive.
But no. This kind of speculation could blinker a man just as effectively as any other kind. He wanted to be acute, not lustful. He blanked his mind again, automatically rearranging the already perfect lines of his sage-brown dress uniform — and failed to notice the speculative glance she shot him from the corner of her wide, violet eyes.
The office of the Deputy Director looked down towards the square where the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky himself had stood until so recently. With his mind still carefully blank, Boris Bovary glanced across the room from the doorway, noted the view and then concentrated on the man who was standing idly looking down upon it. At least the KGB was not yet run by women, the soldier mused, unlike the British Secret Services.